later, devastated by the unhappy outcome of an unrequited love, Kardiner
dropped out of the medical program. A lengthy period of introspection
and a "course of ceaseless agony" ensued, interrupted finally by a
relatively brief excursion in the social sciences ( Kardiner 1977:46). While
continuing his unsuccessful pursuit of the woman who had spurned him,
Kardiner tried a new direction, enrolling in the graduate program at
Columbia University in 1913. Although he initially majored in
philosophy, taking courses on modern philosophical systems given by
the celebrated scholars John Dewey and Felix Adler, Kardiner soon
shifted his theoretical interests to cultural anthropology. He registered for
a full-year course in general anthropology, a course on the "Ethnography
of Europe" taught by Franz Boas, and an interdisciplinary seminar jointly
directed by Boas and Dewey called "Sessions in Ethnology." ¹ In addition
to courses in Sanskrit (in which he briefly minored), Kardiner informally
attended numerous lectures given by Boas, Alexander Goldenweiser, and
other anthropologists. Impressed by Boas's wide-ranging mastery of the
discipline, Kardiner developed a "great admiration for him." ² A half-
century later, he still recalled having written a lengthy paper on
Melanesian magic under Boas's tutelage. ³ In his brief anthropological
training in the Boasian tradition of American anthropology, Kardiner
gained an inductive orientation toward discerning the loosely articulated
congruences within cultural wholes -- a methodological approach which
he later adapted to the format of his psychocultural seminar with Ralph
Linton and Cora Du Bois in the 1930s. The encounter with Boas, he later
commented, "made an enduring impression on me," and "I wondered
whether I couldn't make a career of going into anthropology." ⁴ But
although his coursework had "whetted his appetite for cultural studies"
( Meyers 1980:50), Kardiner assessed the prospects for employment as
bleak. Despite his high regard for Boas, Kardiner reluctantly concluded
that a career in anthropology was impractical, and he decided to return to
medical school ( Kardiner 1977:50-51).

At Cornell, and during his subsequent two-year internship at Mount
Sinai Hospital, Kardiner was both student and analysand of Horace W.
Frink, an instructor of neurology who, like his colleague C. P.
Oberndorf, had become "increasingly bold in using psychoanalytic
mechanisms in the presentation of cases to students" ( Oberndorf
1953:123). Impressed with Frink's enthusiasm for Freudian psychology
and intrigued by an emerging field that promised to illuminate the
"mysteries of the human mind" ( 1977: 52 ), Kardiner resolved to
specialize in psychiatry. ⁵ Thus, during the years of World War I,
Kardiner received training in both psychoanalysis and anthropology, two
disciplines still relatively new to the American intellectual landscape.
Under the organizational leadership of Boas at Columbia University,

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